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Facing Missions Today: 40 Naming God in the Face of Suffering and Tribulation Introduction:
Islam speaks of the 99 names for God.
Names in many cultures have meaning.
They reveal something about the person—the day of his or her birth, an
event, something significant about the child, and so forth. So, too, our naming of God. Moses famously asked after God’s name in
Exodus 3 and was told by God, ‘I AM has sent you’ (3.14).[1]
The following study concerns naming God in the
context of tribulation. This is a deeply
personal concern, but it is also missiological: the revealing of God in an evil
world full of suffering and persecution—as the two witnesses prophesying in sackcloth
in Revelation 11. For this study,
Revelation 15 and 16 will be the focus texts as they provide significant depth
to our understanding as Christians about naming God when there is suffering and
evil. We are not only interested in
knowing what to call God. We are
interested in knowing how to name God in…

Issues
Facing Missions Today: 39.2 ‘The World is Coming to Us’
The second point for discussion in our
imaginary ‘Mission 101’ course (module) is:[1]
Point
2: ‘We really no longer need to go anywhere for mission work: through
immigration, the world is coming to ‘us.’’
In the previous post, which challenged the suggestion
that there are no mission fields today, the issue of immigration was already
raised (and reading on this from Andrew Walls and Timothy Tennent placed on our
indicative bibliography for the course).
Two very important points in missions are acknowledged: there is in our
day an amazing movement of people to the West, and the West increasingly offers
new mission fields for missionaries coming from what used to be mission fields
in their own right. Immigration to the
West is an important part of present-day missions (as it was in, say,
Augustine’s day!). Yet there are also problems
with the statement as it appears in Point 2 and in many off-handed
conversations.
One pos…

Issues
Facing Missions Today: 39.1 ‘Missions is not from the West to the Rest?’Introduction: In post number 36 of 'Issues Facing Missions Today,' I raised 20 topics for
discussion in a hypothetical ‘Missions 101' course (or module). Dr. Mark
Royster tossed me an irresistible bone in a comment on that post: he suggested that I set up an opportunity for discussion around these points, giving me a limit of 500 words
for each one. (I will try to keep things in
the neighbourhood of 1,000 words.) Knowing
that much discussion has already taken place around these topics, I’m somewhat
reticent to gnaw on these 20 points, but it is also unfair of me to
leave things as I posted them earlier.
So, with the caveat that what is said here is incomplete and
introductory, I will attempt to offer some
commentary to which others might respond with corrections and expansions as
they see fit (allowing for some moderation on my part if the need arises). The goal here is to
identify truth in …